ct the United States
constitute only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling
the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended
network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which
daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a
higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation. Thus, these
antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and
collision results.

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is
accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators,
and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an
irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it
means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become
either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.
Either the cotton- and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar
plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free-labor, and
Charleston and New Orleans become marts of legitimate merchandise alone,
or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York
must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the
production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets
for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend
this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final
compromises between the slave and free States, and it is the existence
of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when
made, vain and ephemeral. Startling as this saying may appear to you,
fellow-citizens, it is by no means an original or even a modern one. Our
forefathers knew it to be true, and unanimously acted upon it when
they framed the Constitution of the United States. They regarded the
existence of the servile system in so many of the States with sorrow and
shame, which they openly confessed, and they looked upon the collision
between them, which was then just revealing itself, and which we are now
accustomed to deplore, with favor and hope. They knew that one or the
other system must exclusively prevail.

Unlike too many of those who in modern time invoke their authority, they
had a choice between the two. They preferred the system of free labor,
and they determined to organize the government, and so direct its
activity, that that system should surely and certainly prevail. For this